The present invention relates to skive devices, and more particularly to an improved skive and sheet guide device that can be used for stripping and guiding a copy sheet from a fuser roller in an electrostatographic apparatus.
The use of skives for stripping sheet-like members from surfaces in various types of apparatus, is well known. More specifically, it is well known to use a skive for stripping copy sheets from the surfaces of fuser rollers in electrostatographic apparatus. A fuser roller in such apparatus commonly has a soft, flexible outer surface that is flexed as a copy sheet is conveyed through the nip formed between the fuser roller and a backup roller, or between two fuser rollers. This soft surface of the fuser roller can be damaged by the stripper fingers of a skive when the skive is being loaded against the fuser roller surface, and when copy sheet jams occur at the fusing station. Repeated jams can also knock the stripper fingers out of adjustment relative to the fuser roller, thereby necessitating readjustments.
In addition, copy sheets stripped from the fuser roller must also be guided to continue moving in a defined path, and away from the fusing station. Such copy sheets, if allowed to curl or buckle as each exits the fusing station, are likely to cause jams. Guide members therefore are used cooperatively with the stripper fingers to limit the deflection and curl in such sheets as each exits the fusing station.
Typically, the guide members are mounted on a bar adjacent the backup roller and the stripper fingers are mounted on a separate bar adjacent the fuser roller. The gapping between the two bars therefore requires adjustment for proper copy sheet path control. Consequently, the guides and the fingers are either mounted to each bar with screws or other fasteners which can come loose, or they are spring-clamped to the bars - a practice that frequently results in loose guides and fingers. The fingers, in addition, have to be assembled to the bar in the field, and must therefore be adjusted and readjusted individually.
Guide members and stripping fingers mounted and adjustable as described here, are expensive and costly to maintain. It will therefore be advantageous to provide a one-piece preassembled skive and guide assembly that includes no loose parts and no screws or similar fasteners, and that requires no field gapping or expensive adjustments.